Watching STS-91 landing

Wow! It is hot here at Kennedy Space Center! I just came back from the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) where I saw STS-91 bring Astronaut Andy Thomas back home from his stay aboard the Russian Space Station Mir. This was an event that I had never attended before and I was quite excited. We boarded our bus from the Kennedy Space Center Headquarters Building and made the 15-minute drive to the SLF. I was tasked as a guide for this trip. On the way out to the SLF I informed all of the riders of what their actions should be in the event that anything should go wrong during the landing operation.

The doors of the bus opened to a temperature of 93 degrees Fahrenheit with a heat index of 105 to 110 degrees - HOT! The winds were easterly at 9 knots gusting to 15 knots, so runway 15 would be used for the landing. Approximately 500 people were there to view the landing. The SLF has a speaker system set up so that all of the viewers are aware of the progress of the shuttle landing and what phase it is in. Twenty minutes to go! During that time all of the viewers were alive with the anticipation of seeing Discovery come home.

Now somebody pointed to a little white speck in the sky and everyone turned to look at it. The speck was Columbia and in short order it began getting larger and more identifiable. Next came the very familiar sonic boom. The sonic boom is really two distinct claps that occur a fraction of a second apart and are audible to the human ear. It is the noise produced by an aircraft flying at supersonic speeds. The vehicle, in effect, compresses the air in front of the nose and the wing, creating shock waves that spread away from the aircraft.

We could now all see Columbia maneuvering through a 180 degree turn to align with runway 15. Alignment looked great and then came the landing gear. The landing gears are deployed only after the spacecraft has an indicated airspeed of less than 300 knots (345 mph) and an altitude of approximately 250 feet. Next was the main gear touch down followed by the nose gear. The Drag shoot was deployed followed by the rollout.

The entire event was a beautiful sight to see. All of the viewers applauded and began moving toward the buses to take shelter from the heat. As I mentioned earlier this was my first live landing and I have to say that it was just as impressive as the launches are to me! I hope that each of you will get the opportunity to witness this someday!

Publisher quality photos of the landing can be found here.
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/captions/hotpics.htm

Shuttle Landing Facility Information can be found here.
Shuttle Landing Facility http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/slf.html

The entire sequence of events for landing operations can be found here.
Shuttle Landing Operations http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/stsover-landing.html

Astronaut Andy Thomas comments can be found here.
Astronaut Andy Thomas http://shuttle.nasa.gov/shuttle-mir/mir25/status/week12/thomas.html